Swades Revisited-II

Mea Culpa folks! I wrote the last post in a hurry to save the dying blog of mine in a crunch situation so didn’t bother to edit the blog, as I normally do. So changes

• this grand puja is called Bhagwat as I came to know later


• Certain other mistakes in word usage.

Anyways, I am here to continue about my visit to my village. And while telling you about the pandits I forgot to mention that the one pandit was fighting with Guru Maharaj (as the name suggests, the supreme pandit) for share of the dakshina which was collected during the dan-dakshina and my mother eventually settled it by paying extra to the pandit.

I was very little interested in the puja, may be because at some point in my life I was a hardcore atheist and although I do believe in God but such display of worship, puja, bhagwat doesn’t appeal to me at all. So while all the time pandits were running through the mantras, I sneaked into the nearby garden to enjoy the cool wind. When my elder brother came to know of this, he (() scolded me for sneaking away from bhagwat.

Well here is the funny part; when I reached home, it got a little dark and everyone was having food, my chachi cracked the joke that Guru Maharaj (GM) had earlier said that in Bhagwats, cow-dung and cow-urine should be taken as charnamrit instead of normal milk, curd, sugar, coconut etc etc. I would have refused to take it or better thrust it down the throat of GM had he tried that. But chachi kept on laughing about it, so that made me suspicious and in the end mummy relented and said that charnamrit did contain a little of the sacred stuff. Now at that time if you give me water, in the dark (if I haven’t already told you my village is a backward village where electricity is still not there) it appeared like urine. Boy, I was furious but it was of no use now. I still smile as I think that I was nagging like a child when this news took me by surprise, although to be quite honest I didn’t feel any difference in the taste probably because of the heavy sugar to counter it. But would you agree to swim in a swimming pool, if you were told that a little boy just pissed a few drops in the pool? ((

P.S.: This incident triggered a good debate between me and my mother on God, Faith and spiritualism when we reached Allahabad but more of that in the next blogs of this series...

P.S.S.: Coming up in the next blog of this series: Mohan Bhargava in my village’s school!!

P.S.S.S.: You wouldn’t want to hear how my chachi went about collecting the urine and how unadulterated sample was tested on my two young cousins ((